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    Peer governance: towards non-representational democracy

    photo of Vasilis Kostakis

    Vasilis Kostakis
    9th June 2007


    This entry was posted on Saturday, June 9th, 2007 at 12:05 am and is filed under Empire, P2P Hierarchy Theory, P2P Politics, P2P Theory. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

    8 Responses to “Peer governance: towards non-representational democracy”

    1. james Says:
      June 9th, 2007 at 10:59 am

      vasilis, what do you think will happen with the state monopoly on violence if we decouple ourselves from representational democracy? Will we revert back to tribal groups with AK47s?

    2. Michel Bauwens Says:
      June 9th, 2007 at 12:33 pm

      Hi Vasilis,

      I see representational democracy as functioning on a different plane.

      If you operate in conditions of scarcity, there are 3 main ways to allocate resources: the pricing mechanism, the hierarchical mechanism, or the democratic mechanism, the latter of which can exist in different variants …

      But in a condition of abundance, you do not have to worry a priori about the allocation of resources, you allow anyone to try out alternatives, then, after it, you can have a distributed mechanism, or not, for judging the quality. Democracy works in decentralized structures, but may not be the best mechanism for distributed structures, and it is in the latter that peer governance comes into its own.

    3. Vasilis Kostakis Says:
      June 9th, 2007 at 4:35 pm

      I have two comments, one for James and one for Michel’s comments.

      1st comment:

      Dear James, the terminus is not to decouple ourselves from representational democracy but to participate as much as we can. As Plato stated “the punishment which the wise suffer who refuse to take part in the government, is to live under the government of worse men”. So, in my view through massive participation in social and economic events, which always re-express themselves as political concepts, the next step is the transition of representational democracy to a non-representational one (i.e. “the absolute democracy”). Therefore, the fore mentioned transition will be the natural symptom of massive participation. Of course, nowadays if some groups of people agreed to decouple themselves from representational democracy, the state monopoly on violence would be enhanced. The terminus is not to decouple but to participate, experiment and create things within the current political, economic and social status, which afterwards will become the dominant modes of production, property and governance. I’ve just claimed that in the Participatory Age non-representational democracy will belong to the past.

      2cd comment:

      Dear Michel, you are speaking of peer governance as a mechanism within distributed structures. In my opinion, in a representative democracy where the distributed networks will become the majority, this transition (i.e. representative to non-representative democracy) seems to be the subsequent result.

    4. Tom Loeber Says:
      June 9th, 2007 at 5:13 pm

      Much confusion exists because of our poor understanding of basics due to a legacy of having no other models to refer too than our current anarchy. A state is a set of conditions, not a geographical space. What we call government now is reliant on second-order cybernetic assumptions, we can’t see the forest for the trees. Lysander Spooner in the late 19th century pointed out how no constitution meets the fundamental requirements of a valid contract. What can we expect when our social architecture is based on fraudulent assumptions?

      Without hierarchies you have nothing. It is the juxtapositional differences of status in the flow of information that leads to identity, not who wields the greatest force. “Might decides right” is a major dictum of our poor understanding. The key is not to seek no hierarchy but rather quickly changing and continually tested hierarchy without power corrupting the messages coursing through or social information system. The tools exist to create such for all of humanity, a true global governing system. P2P will play a necessary and fundamental role. With its use and the recognition that we must seek to optimize ergodicity, social status mobility, we can beat the Fermi paradox and find this population of thinking entities can survive and progress with increasing health and freedom accruing success. There is only so much of an open window for us to make humanity a success. We will be pushed to find and adopt working strategies as our power grows and our need for intelligence in our affairs increases. Watch the weather take a quick dump, pushing us to decide whether we want to continue to exist or find the only non-hierarchical state of affairs, death.

    5. Vasilis Kostakis Says:
      June 9th, 2007 at 5:15 pm

      Sorry, in the 1st comment I meant to say “… in the Participatory Age representational democracy will belong to the past.”

    6. Vasilis Kostakis Says:
      June 11th, 2007 at 3:06 pm

      Dear Tom, your point of view is intriguing. I have to admit that I was not so clear in my formulation regarding hierarchy (1st point:”…non-hierarchical…” and 2nd point:”…hierarchy is crumbled…”). I meant to say that hierarchy, as we know it, results in aggregative authority within representational democracy. Because even in P2P projects there is a kind of “hierarchy” or more accurately organisation based on leadership instead of authority. In addition, the word hierarchy (Greek: Ιεραρχία) implies a dependent relation in terms of obedience and bidding, so in my opinion the use of an alternative term to characterise the new type of “hierarchy” seems essential.

    7. Tom Loeber Says:
      June 11th, 2007 at 7:48 pm

      Dear Vasilis

      I hear you. Hierarchy has received a negative connotation and reasonably so as its manifestation has been rather coincidental and unchanging, resulting in much violence (note of clarification, appears that “violence” is the unintelligent application of force). An allegorical statement I saw recently concerns the “melting pot,” if not stirred sufficiently, the bottom gets burned and scum rises to the top, ruining the whole dish.

      Me thinks clarification of existing terminology will pay off better than necessarily attempting to invent new. Weaponry has been the chief teleology receiving the lion-share of human efforts to date. Whether or not a term is new to someone is dependenct on many factors. A new term for many that Buckminster Fuller coined decades ago is “Livingry” which I surmise has much room for rewarding innovation. Another term which needs much clarification is “democracy.” How can any social experiment to date validly call itself a representational democracy (dÄ“mos, people) when its statistical dynamics do not involve the population of all of humanity (the gist of Spooner’s observation is that constitutions do not contain the approval of all affected parties)? Still, though tangential to humanity’s apparent suicidal leanings, the science of livingry develops and we should expect some major break-throughs. Sufficient understanding by a few, perhaps even just one person, could lead to the creation of a new tool that proves appealing and viable so struggling too much to bring awareness to many can be counter-productive. “The proof will be in the eating.”

    8. La démocratie non-représentative Says:
      July 22nd, 2008 at 8:29 am

      […] sans cesse cette possibilité, spécialement à la fin du Cinquième pouvoir, et ce petit billet de Vasilis Kostakis découvert par Florent a réveillé mon […]

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